


Seek My Room

by evansentranced



Category: Sherlock (TV), Sherlock Holmes & Related Fandoms
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, Dark, Episode Fix-It: s04e03 The Final Problem, Episode: s04e03 The Final Problem, Gen, I wrote this right after it came out in a fit of rage and promptly forgot about it, Psychopath, actual psychopath, how the last episode should've ended, so here you go, writer emerges from the dark hole she disappeared into two years ago to give you this random shit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-12
Updated: 2017-12-12
Packaged: 2019-02-13 21:56:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,191
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12993333
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/evansentranced/pseuds/evansentranced
Summary: Sherlock finds Eurus in her childhood bedroom, and finally finds out what the final problem is.What should've happened at the end of The Final Problem, if the writers had bothered to carry out what they set up. I know I'm late to the party, guys. I only just found this buried at the bottom of my fic folder. Idk if this idea has already been done to death or not. Oh well.





	Seek My Room

_ “I’m not allowed to tell my name to strangers.” _

_ “But I’m not a stranger, am I?” _

 

Sherlock opens the door to Eurus’ old bedroom, stirring up ash and dust and revealing his sister, waiting on the floor in the center of the debris.

“I’m here,” he says, and though he intends to sound reassuring, something about her posture, the expression on her face, it doesn’t feel right. It isn’t what he expected, when he was racing up here. 

“You solved it,” she says, watching him with those dark, sharp eyes. “You finally solved it, Sherlock. Took you long enough.”

“What is this?” He asks, his eyes leaving hers briefly to rove around the room. “This is the answer, but how?”

“This is it,” she agrees, still seated on the floor, her arms wrapped round her legs in a protective position he doesn’t fully trust. “The final problem.” Her voice goes a touch higher, younger, becomes afraid, and she adds, “Help me, save me, please!”

She keeps her eyes on him as she speaks, and he stares back, his heart thudding. “Context,” he says.

“Mmm, yes,” she says, still watching him. Her eyes never leave him, even as he walks to the broken window, peering out. “The well is filling, Sherlock.” His back stiffens and he turns away from the window to see that she has shifted, sitting facing him now, legs crossed. “Here it is, the final problem. James understood what it was. Do you understand?”

There’s a crackle of static in Sherlock’s ear, and he can hear splashing, chains. John’s labored breathing.

“John,” he says, turning his focus inward now, concentrating on the earpiece entirely.

“Sherlock!” John says, his relief obvious now. “I’d really like to get out of this well, if you don’t mind.”

Sherlock smiles faintly, desperately. “I’m nearly there, John. Just hold on, I’m going to get you out--”

The connection is severed, and Sherlock blinks, finding that Eurus has not moved, though her gaze is cold and calculating, narrower than before.

“There it is,” she says. “You see, Sherlock? There’s the problem.”

He isn’t following. “What do you mean?” he asks, hating the words even as he says them. “I don’t understand.”

“The final problem,” she says, her voice slow and precise, as though not wanting him to get lost along the way. “Is that you’re distracted.”

Sherlock stares at her. He doesn’t understand, he tells himself. His heart is racing, his hands clammy. He’s shaking. But that’s how people feel when they don’t understand things, right? He wouldn’t know, except that he’s remembered. All those hours trying to solve Eurus’ riddle as a child, searching, feeling just like this. Not understanding.

“Redbeard distracted you from me when we were small,” she explains, and despite her lack of affect, he knows the emotions that she ought to be setting behind the words, the emotions any other person would express. She doesn’t have to. Sherlock reacts to them anyway, sharp icicles of her rage pricking at him. “He distracted you, John, even when James gave you the most  _ delightful _ puzzles. You loved them, Sherlock. They were a gift for you, and you cast them aside.”

Sherlock shakes his head, gazing right back at her as she speaks, still thinking frantically. If John is the problem, how does Sherlock find the well? Is this a clue, in itself?

“Even now, Sherlock,” she says, and something in her voice snaps him out of his racing thoughts and has him  _ really _ looking at her. “Even after the masterpiece I’ve created for you here. Even after this parade of scientific inquiry, he’s distracting you from ME.”   
  
Sherlock can’t help himself; he flinches at her raised voice.

“No,” he says, shaking his head. When he realizes he’s doing it, he stops. “John’s not the problem, he’s not, Eurus. He’s--”

Eurus stops him talking with a sharpened glance. She still hasn’t stood up from the floor. “He’s the problem. I have the solution.”

“I don’t--”

“Say goodbye to your problems, Sherlock,” she orders. Static crackles in his ear, and Sherlock experiences a moment of pure panic at the realization that this might not be a clue. There might not  _ be _ any more clues.

“Sherlock?” John’s calling him, his voice tinny over their fragile connection. Sherlock’s breath is coming in short pants. “Sherlock, are you there?”

“I’m here,” he says, and he’s horrified to hear his voice waver. He has to solve this. The riddle of where John is. The riddle of the well. “I’m going to--” He has to pause, clear his throat. “I’m going to get you out, John.”

John’s voice is silent for a second too long. And then he huffs out a short laugh, no doubt trying to lighten his next question. “Promise?”

Sherlock’s inhale is audible, and suddenly John is speaking again, his words coming in a rush. “It’s okay, Sherlock,” he says, his voice more calm than he has any right being. “It’s fine. It’s all fine. Just do your thing, okay? It’s just another puzzle, isn’t it? Just another set of clues?”

Sherlock nods, clenching his fists at his sides. He’s turned his back to Eurus again and is looking out through the shards of glass in the window frame, wanting for the clue of her room to be meaningful in some way. To be more than what he fears it is. 

Not a clue. An instruction.

“John,” he says, but he realizes even as he speaks that the background noises of the water have gone. She’s already disconnected them. Without having to think very much about it, Sherlock pries a long shard of the glass out of the frame. Blood slides down his wrist as he turns back to Eurus, who still sits at the edge of the collapsed floor in the middle of the ash-strewn room, legs crossed.

“If you kill me, you’ll never find him,” she advises, correctly interpreting his first thought. He has a second, though, and holds the glass to his own jugular without missing a beat. She sits up a little straighter, suddenly, eyes fixed on the shard. 

“If you die, he dies,” she says, but there’s a hint of affect in her voice, now, and Sherlock thinks he’s on the right track. She scowls at him. “You can’t use brute force here, Sherlock, it won’t work.”

“If he dies, you lose all your leverage,” he says, aware that he’s bargaining with very few chips. “If he lives, I’ll keep doing as you ask.”

“You’ll keep thinking of him,” she said, something akin to a sneer shaping her mouth. “You’re not for him.”

“Yes, you’re right,” Sherlock agreed hastily. “You’re my sister, of course you come first. You don’t need to kill anyone to prove how important you are to me. We’ve only just met again and I--”

She stands finally, languidly. Her eyes are narrow. “You forgot I existed.”

“That was the mistake in-- in killing V-victor, wasn’t it?” Sherlock agreed, the hand holding the shard of glass to his neck slick with blood and sweat. “I forgot you. The better choice this time would be to leave him alive, to let me-- you’ll want to have him to hold over my head, won’t you? So that I’ll do as you say always.”

She takes a step toward him. He intends to take a step back, and finds that he hasn’t a moment later, when she starts speaking. “I want to kill everyone and everything that has ever held your attention until there’s nothing left to you but me.” 

Sherlock swallows hard, his adam’s apple bobbing under the glass. 

“You'll never forget me again, brother, I promise you.”

“I won’t ever think of him again,” he breathes, panic clogging his throat. John surely can’t have much more time. “I’ll never speak to him. If you tell me where he is, I’ll tell him I’m leaving London and I don’t want to know him anymore.”

He can see in her eyes that she likes the idea of him voluntarily disposing of this relationship. It’s a treat to her. She wore the same expression after Sherlock finished his phone call with Molly at Sherrinford.

“Make it hurt,” she says, suddenly agreeable and pleasant. He hasn’t seen her act this human since she’d been pretending to be the daughter of a serial killer. She seemed to put it on like a hat, and Sherlock couldn’t sense a flicker of the greedy, sharklike expression she’d worn mere moments ago. “Oh, hmm, I could tell you what to say, but I think you’d know better what will dig in under his skin and eat at him. Make him bleed for you.”

“And then you’ll let him--” Sherlock cuts himself off when the static crackles in his ear again, the now-familiar sound heralding a deluge of emotions he can barely breath beneath. “John.”

“Sherlock!” The splashing is significantly louder this time around. “The water’s up to my chest, please tell me you’ve come up with something!”

“I have to--” Sherlock looks at Eurus, who says nothing, watching. “John, I have to tell you something.”

“What?” Sherlock can hear fingers scrabbling against rock. “Is this really the best time?”

“It has to be,” he says, and now all he can hear on the other end is the steady splashing of water against rock. He pushes forward, trying not to think about what this must seem like. “John, you know that I-- have always considered you my closest-- my best friend.”

“Sherlock, don’t do this.”   
  
Sherlock squeezes his eyes shut and continues. “You were there for me, you used to be-- what I mean to say is-- things now. They’re different.”   


John’s silence weighs heavy, until, “Different?”

“I l-loved you, as you must know, but... After Mary, after... after the hospital. Those months when you wouldn’t speak to me. Things are-- they can’t be the same. I can’t keep waiting for scraps of your affection like--” He took a deep breath. “Like a dog. I’d do anything for you, John.” He hopes that’s the part John remembers, later, and not, “You obviously don’t feel the same.”

“Sherlock,” John says slowly. “I’m in a well. D’you-- do you remember that?”

Sherlock nods, then says, “I know.”

“And you’re-- giving me this speech anyway? Right now?”

“I felt a need to get it off my chest,” Sherlock says weakly. His breath is coming too fast. He feels almost dizzy. John doesn’t sound appropriately gutted, and Sherlock doesn’t want to push him there, he can’t keep  _ doing  _ this to him, not to John, not anymore.

“After this,” he says anyway, feeling wetness on his cheeks and ignoring it. “Once we’ve left this place, I don’t want to-- see you any longer.”

“Sherlock, this isn’t--”

“I’m moving out. I don’t want you to try to contact me again. I was wrong before, to think that this was worth something. That you were worth something. Mycroft was right. Sentiment is useless.”

“Stop whatever this is and--”

“Ever since I came back it’s been like this,” he says, raising his voice. “I step out of line and you get angry, John. You didn’t need me anymore once you had Mary, and it became obvious that what I was to you was nothing more than a crutch. Keep you on your toes, give you a bit of excitement in your life.” His every muscle was tensed, screaming at him, but Sherlock pushed on. There wasn’t much time. 

“With Mary around, I was an afterthought. There was no place for me in your life any longer unless she made it for me. She was the only reason we saw each other after I came back, John. She pushed us together, quite against your will sometimes.” It isn’t true, but it’s true enough that he may convince John that he feels that way. That’s what matters, getting the reaction Eurus wants to save John’s life. “We never saw each other after you got married until you found me in a bloody drug den.”

“It wasn’t-- like that, Sherlock,” John says. His voice has lost the irritated, angry quality from before. He sounds subdued, worried. 

“It was exactly like that. You don’t care for me, John, not really. I died and you moved on. I did us both a disservice in coming back.”

“Sherlock, no--”

“I cared for Mary, but I know you think I should’ve died before she did, John. You said it. You can’t deny that. You despise me, really. My ribs can attest to that. I’d be surprised that you came back to save me in the hospital if it hadn’t involved locking up a serial killer.”

“You can’t really think these things,” John said, but there was no conviction in his voice. His tone was flat, lifeless. Sherlock took a deep breath, blinking through the glossy film over his eyes.

“There’s nothing left between us, nothing good. I’ll be leaving Baker Street and I won’t bother you further.”

“Sherlock--” John’s voice is an agonizing blend of guilt, desperation, and pain, and the sudden silence in Sherlock’s ear is nothing short of torture. 

He lifts his eyes to Eurus, sees her canary-feather smile, and feels his hand shake against his own neck, the glass nicking open a tiny wound. He can feel the blood run down his throat as he watches her, quite aware that those might be the last words he ever says to John Watson. They could even be the last words John ever hears. He needs to find him like nothing he has ever needed in his life before this point. 

“I’m keeping up my end,” Sherlock says, blinking away the moisture in his eyes. “If he dies, I die.”

“Tiresome,” Eurus says, though her smile dims slightly. Sherlock presses his advantage.

“If Mycroft doesn’t have him safe in ten minutes, I will kill myself.” He’s able to meet her eyes firmly on this point. He isn’t lying.

They hold the gaze for long moments, and Sherlock is too caught up in John’s fate to give her as much as she wants. It’s obvious by the frustrated way she snaps out her phone with a sharp gesture and begins typing. It’s quiet in the ashes of her childhood bedroom. Sherlock feels alone.

“I just want you to love me, Sherlock,” she says unexpectedly. He tilts his head to stare at her. She sounds so sincere. “You’re my brother. My favorite, you know. Mycroft was always so dull and predictable, but  _ you _ . You could always surprise me.”

Sherlock shivers, and she tracks the movement avidly. 

“So many emotions,” she says. “I never could understand what it was like in your funny little brain.”

Sherlock feels inescapably diminished. An abyss yawns open between his mind and hers, full of unknowable possibilities, unhindered by empathy or the usual expectations. With a frisson of disquieting alarm, he pictures Sally Donovan’s sneering face and understands.

A psychopath. Intellect without sentiment. Eurus could just as easily hug him next as shoot him in the head, and say either way that she was doing it for the novelty of the thing.  

Eurus’s eyes drop away from him again to look at her phone. He’s beginning to feel overwhelmed by the constancy and intensity of her gaze. She’s looked away a grand total of twice since he arrived, and otherwise has been staring, almost unblinkingly at him.

“Time to go,” she announces without preamble. Sherlock’s eyes snap to the window, then back to her, desperation clawing up his throat.

“John--” he says. “It hasn’t been--” He should have been paying better attention to the time. Has it been six minutes or seven? How much longer can he last?

“Now,” Eurus says, turning her back on him and sweeping out of the room. Sherlock follows, his mind strangely absent of the usual whirring and swirling of thoughts. He thinks of John, and of Eurus and the earpiece Sherlock is wearing. If there’s any chance that something will go wrong, he needs to know. He needs to know immediately when John is safe, and his phone is long gone, has been since he woke up here.

He takes the stairs just behind her, avoiding the sagging bits and the chunks of stone that scatter his path. They step outside and Sherlock listens: he wants to hear people shouting, a helicopter. Dogs. Something to indicate that there are people out here, saving John. 

He hears an engine, and a nondescript black car slides out of the shadows at the end of the drive to wait in front of them. Sherlock’s heart leaps. He has never been more relieved at the idea of seeing his brother. Mycroft will surely have things under control by now. 

Eurus steps aside for Sherlock to climb in, and he does, after a brief, still anxious glance around the darkened fields outside the old manor.

He hears the tinkling of glass outside the car, and then Eurus is climbing in after him and shutting the door. The divider is up. Sherlock can’t see the driver. 

The upholstery isn’t right. All of Mycroft’s cars are broadly the same in that sense, but this car....

Sherlock notices the lack of handles on the doors and his empty hands in the same moment. He’s not holding his glass shard anymore. When had he dropped it?

He looks at Eurus, who is smiling at him. When had he handed it to her? When had he so thoroughly lost control of this situation?

“You’ve been so good,” Eurus tells him, looking as though she might pat his knee. She doesn’t. “And you see, Sherlock, I can reward good behavior.”

A hint of static, the rush of water-- Sherlock’s hand comes up to cover the earpiece, as though he could physically hold the connection to John, keep it from being taken away. 

“John?” he asks, his voice louder than necessary. He can still hear the water, so John’s head can’t be under the surface already, he has to be right about that much. “John!”

He can hear other voices shouting, but not John’s. “John answer me! Are you alright?”

People are a good sign, other voices. Someone’s with John, getting him to safety. He must be too busy to answer. Perhaps he’s dropped his earpiece. Perhaps it’s been taken out. Maybe he’s fallen asleep in an ambulance. Struggling in that well must have been exhausting, but he’s safe now, he’s safe, he must be. 

Even so, hearing his voice would make it easier to breathe.

Sherlock tries again, keeps talking, waiting for someone to hear him and respond. The voices keep shouting, and Sherlock tries to decide if they’re raising their voices in panic, or to be heard. The distortion from the earpiece makes it difficult. And he can still hear the water splashing.

The sound cuts off, and Sherlock looks up at Eurus, suddenly exhausted. John is... either alive or not, now. He can no longer affect the outcome. 

He looks at the lack of handles on the doors again. 

“Where are we going?” he asks. 

“Don't you worry about that,” she tells him.

**Author's Note:**

> There's a happy way for this to end and a really dark way. I'd be happy to tell you about either if you ask, but idk if I'll ever actually write either one down.


End file.
